AMD makes gains on the ground it won
with Llano
When AMD’s desktop Llano APUs were released
last year, the underdog of the CPU market had a product of which it could be proud.
Llano’s integrated graphics core proved be in a different league to Intel’s HD
graphics, and was actually able to play games at respectable settings without
the need for a discrete graphics card. Sadly, Llano wasn’t able to keep up with
Intel outside of games, however, with its scores in our Media Benchmarks suite
lagging behind by quite significant margins.
The successor to Llano is finally here,
though, and Trinity, as it’s codenamed, not only boasts a more powerful GPU,
but an overhauled architecture to give it more grunt outside games too. Behind
these improvements are the introduction of Piledriver modules – revamped
versions of those featured in AMD’s recent FX-series CPUs that are equipped
with 2MB of L2 cache each.
These house two x86 cores, with the
A10-5800K offering two modules with a total of four cores, including 4MB of L2
cache overall.
As well as better power efficiency, AMD
also claims that Trinity has less power leakage, better power efficiency,
improved branch prediction and superior cacheing compared to both its Llano and
Bulldozer architectures.
At $150.9, the A10-5800K is the fastest APU
in AMD’s new A-series, which stretches all the way down to the A4-5300 at $72.
The A10-5800K has a CPU frequency of 3.8GHz, but it can boost up to a lofty
4.2GHz. the GPU, meanwhile, is an AMD Radeon HD 7660D, with 384 stream
processors and a GU clock speed of 800MHz.
As it has no on-board graphics memory, like
Llano, the GPU relies on system RAM. This means that overclocking your memory
or using faster DIMMs will mean that you’re essentially overclocking the GPU’s
memory.
Thankfully, there appears to be plenty of
available stock across the range; we hope it stays this way and don’t see the
supply issues that plagued Llano. Sadly, however, if you did manage to get hold
of a Socket FM1 APU, the A10-5800K isn’t backwards compatible. Instead, AMD has
launched a new CPU socket called Socket FM2, meaning that Socket FM1 has had a
fairly short life. However, AMD has promised to support Socket FM2 for at least
one generation past Trinity. The A55 and A75 chipsets have made their way
across to Socket FM2, and there’s also see a new chipset, called A85X, which
boasts eight SATA 6Gbps ports as well as CrossFire X support with two discrete
graphics cards. We’ll be looking at a few FM2 motherboards in our next issue,
so watch this space.
Performance
In our image editing test, the A10-5800K
was 5 per cent faster than the AMD A8-3870K with a score of 998, but it still
lagged behind the Intel Core i3-2100, which managed 1,331. However, it was 12
per cent faster than the FX-8150, which shows that AMD has made considerable
headway in improving x86 performance. In our video encoding test, the Intel
Core i3-2100 was finally bettered, albeit by less than 60 points, with the AMD
A10-5800K proving to be significantly faster than the AMD A8-3870K too.
The Core i3-2100 also had a slight lead in
the multi-tasking test, but the A10-5800K was a massive 40 per cent faster than
the A8-3870K and even beat the AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition. Overall,
its score of 1,374 was noticeably faster than any previous Llano APU, and just
100 points short of matching the Intel Core i3-2100.
Moving on to games, in Left 4 Dead 2 at
1,680 x 1,050 with 16x AF and High settings, the A10-5800K was in a different
league to the Intel Core i3-2100, which managed just 9fps compared to the
A10-5800K’s 53fps minimum frame rate. At 1,920 x 1,080, the A10-5800K still had
plenty of headroom, managing a minimum frame rate of 47fps.
As it has an unlocked multiplier, we also
managed to overclock the A10-5800K to 4.4GHz using a vcore of 1.5V – a 200MHz
increase over its Turbo frequency, while the GPU was happy run at 844MHz. this
isn’t a massive overclock, however, and not surprisingly, it didn’t yield
massive gains in our Media Benchmarks suite, with the overall score rising just
28 points.
However, Left 4 Dead 2 saw a 4fps rise in the
minimum frame rate at 1,680 x 1,050, and 2fps at 1,280 x 720. The biggest gain
was seen when we dropped in some 2,133MHz Corsair Dominator GT memory though.
This saw the minimum frame rate in Left 4 Dead 2 at 1,280 x 720 rise from 73fps
to 78fps at stock speed. Clearly, using faster memory has a sizeable impact on
gaming performance. Meanwhile, power consumption for the whole system was 149W
under load, rising to 195W once overclocked.
FM2
CPUs aren’t backwards compatible with FM1, requiring new mother boards, such as
this Asus F2A85-M Pro
Conclusion
Trinity is clearly superior to Llano, and
goes a long way to plugging the gap in x86 performance between AMD and Intel’s
budget chips. With Intel recently releasing its Ivy Bridge Core i3 CPUs, this
was important step for AMD. However, the new A-series APUs still have limited
appeal. A Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge Core-i3 CPU is a better option if you
don’t play games, and even if you do, spending more on a discrete graphics
card, such as a Radeon HD 7850, will yield far more performance at 1,920 x
1,080 and above. However, if you’re looking to spend no more than $160.5 on a
CPU and graphics card, it’s the perfect choice.
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Information
Trinity: Good value for money; faster than Intel HD 4000 graphics
in games; better x86 performance than Llano
Cypher: Intel still faster in most x86 applications; not backwards
compatible with Socket FM1
Price: $150.9
Manufacturer: www.amd.com
In detail
·
Frequency: 3.8GHz (4.4GHz Turbo Frequency)
·
Core: Piledriver
·
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 7660D
·
Number of cores: 4x physical
·
Cache: L1: 2 x 64KB shared instruction caches, 4 x
16KB data caches (192KB in total) L2: 4MB
·
Packaging: FM2
·
Thermal design power (TDP): 100W
·
Features: SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4a, SSE4.2, 256-bit
AVW, AESNI, AMD64, Cool ‘n’ Quiet 3.0, AMD-V, MMX, FMA4, XOP
Scores
Speed: 3/5
Features: 4/5
Value: 4/5
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